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I’ve written about Rubrik’s Polaris offering in the past, with GPS being the first cab off the rank. You can think of GPS as the command and control platform, offering multi-cloud control and policy management via the Polaris SaaS framework. I recently had the opportunity to hear from Chris Wahl about Radar and thought it worthwhile covering here.

People don’t want to hear about the problem, because they already know what it is and they want to spend time hearing about how the vendor is going to solve it. I think in this instance, though, it’s worth re-iterating that security attacks happen. A lot. According to the Cisco 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report ransomware attacks are growing by more than 350% annually. It’s Rubrik’s position that security is heavily focused on the edge, with firewalls and desktop protection being the main tools deployed. “Defence in depth is lopsided”, with a focus on prevention, not necessarily the recovery. According to Wahl, “it’s hard to bounce back fast”.

What It Does

So what does Radar do (in the context of Rubrik Polaris)? The idea is that it is increasing the intelligence to know when you get hit, and helping you to recover faster. The goal of Radar is fairly straightforward, with the following activities being key to the solution:

2. Analyse threat impact – Visualise how an attack impacted the system with a detailed view of file content changes at the time of the event.

3. Accelerate recovery – Select all impacted resources, specify the desired location, and restore the most recent clean versions with a few clicks. Rubrik automates the rest of the restore process.

Thoughts and Further Reading

I think there’s a good story to tell with Polaris. SaaS is an accessible way of delivering features to the customer base without the angst traditionally associated with appliance platform upgrades. Data security should be a big part of data protection. After all, data protection is generally critical to recovery once there’s been a serious breach. We’re no longer just protecting against users inside the organisation accidentally deleting large chunks of data, or having to recover from serious equipment failures. Instead, we’re faced with the reality that a bunch of idiots with bad intentions are out to wreck some of our stuff and make a bit of coin on the side. The sooner you know something has gone awry, the quicker you can hopefully recover from the problem (and potentially re-evaluate some of your security). Being attacked shouldn’t be about being ashamed, but it should be about being able to quickly recover and get on with whatever your company does to make its way in the world. With this in mind, I think that Rubrik are on the right track.

You can grab the data sheet from here, and Chris has an article worth checking out here. You can also register to access the Technical Overview here.

Scale Computing announced their HC3 Cloud Unity offering in late September this year. Cloud Unity, in a nutshell, let’s you run embedded HC3 instances in Google Cloud. Coupled with some SD-WAN smarts, you can move workloads easily between on-premises infrastructure and GCP. It enables companies to perform lift and shift migrations, if required, with relative ease, and removes a lot of the complexity traditionally associated of deploying hybrid-friendly workloads in the data centre.

So the WinMagic Thing?

WinMagic have been around for quite some time, and offer a range of security products aimed at various sizes of organization. This partnership with Scale delivers SecureDoc CloudVM as a mechanism for encryption and key management. You can download a copy of the brochure from here. The point of the solution is to provide a secure mechanism for hosting your VMs either on-premises or in the cloud. Key management can be a pain in the rear, and WinMagic provides a fully-featured solution for this that’s easy to use and simple to manage. There’s broad support for a variety of operating environments and clients. Authentication and authorized key distribution takes place prior to workloads being deployed to ensure that the right person is accessing data from an expected place and device and there’s support for password only or multi-factor authentication.

Thoughts

Scale Computing have been doing some really cool stuff in the hyperconverged arena for some time now. The new partnership with Google Cloud, and the addition of the WinMagic solution, demonstrates their focus on improving an already impressive offering with some pretty neat features. It’s one thing to enable customers to get to the cloud with relative ease, but it’s a whole other thing to be able to help them secure their assets when they make that move to the cloud.

It’s my opinion that Scale Computing have been the quiet achievers in the HCI marketplace, with reported fantastic customer satisfaction and a solid range of products on offer at a very reasonable RRP. Couple this with an intelligent hypervisor platform and the ability to securely host assets in the public cloud, and it’s clear that Scale Computing aren’t interested in standing still. I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s next for them. If you’re after an HCI solution where you can start really (really) small and grow as required, it would be worthwhile having a chat to them.

Also, if you’re into that kind of thing, Scale and WinMagic are hosting a joint webinar on November 28 at 10:30am EST. Registration for the webinar “Simplifying Security across your Universal I.T. Infrastructure: Top 5 Considerations for Securing Your Virtual and Cloud IT Environments, Without Introducing Unneeded Complexity” can be found here.

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The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employers, previous or current. This is my blog.

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